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About the Book

Looking at texts including Jean Toomer’s Cane, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Beat poetry by Bob Kaufmann, in this original study, Parham describes the phenomena of haunting, displacement, and ghostliness as endemic to modern African American literature and culture. Not only does memory—conscious and unconscious, individual and collective—often drive African American cultural production, but such memory often arrives to artists from elsewhere, from other times, spaces, and experiences.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Permissions

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Haunting and Displacement

Chapter One: Like Water: Hughes, Cullen, Johnson

Chapter Two: "Do You Love Me?": Another Country

Chapter Three: Behind Carma and Rosie

Chapter Four: Folded Sorrows in Kaufman and Toomer

Chapter Five: Saying "Yes" in Kindred

Chapter Six: Winding Sheets: Petry and Wright

Coda: Future Expectations

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Marisa Parham is Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College and her articles have appeared in Callaloo and ELH.